american-holocaust

EPILOGUE 249still were human-and it still was possible that they might be saved. Time,of course, would change that perception, at least for some later Christiansof Teutonic ancestry. It took a long while for this shift in perception towork toward its hideously logical conclusion-although in Spain, duringthe time that Luther was writing, the doctrine of limpieza de sangre wasdoing its part in laying the essential groundwork-but three centuries lateran otherwise insignificant German writer and Jew-hater named WilhelmMarr publicly proposed that Jews were a separate and degenerate and dangerouslypolluting race. The idea was picked up by others who churnedout their own variations on the theme. 3"In these works the Jews are shown not simply as evil," Norman Cohnhas observed, "but as irremediably evil, the source of their depravity liesno longer simply in their religion but in their very blood." 4 Among thosemore influential than Marr who elaborated on his slander was a devoutChristian of puritanically ascetic sexual pretension, an Englishman-turned­German named Houston Stewart Chamberlain. To Chamberlain a fight tothe death-a holy war-between Jews and Aryans was inevitable, and oncethe Jewish " 'race' was decisively defeated," writes Cohn of Chamberlain'sgrand design, "the Germanic 'race' would be free to realize its own divinelyappointed destiny-which was to create a new, radiant world,transfused with a noble spirituality and mysteriously combining moderntechnology and science with the rural, hierarchical culture of earlier times." 5If that is a dream of manifest destiny that sounds disturbingly familiar tostudents of early American history-with echoes in the writings of JohnWinthrop, Thomas Jefferson, and others-Chamberlain once made an arrestinghistorical connection of his own: upon meeting Hitler, he wrote,he thought of Martin Luther. 6Chamberlain's intuition wasn't wrong. And therein, at first, appears tobe a paradox. For we have suggested that Luther's Judeophobia, hatefulthough it was, was separated from Judeocide-from the Holocaust-bythe absence in Luther's thought of a "racial" definition of the Jews, adefinition that was essential to Hitlerian genocidal ideology. It is a distinctionthat should not be minimized. But neither should something else beforgotten: for all that Hitler held Christianity in low regard, central to histhinking, as well as to that of the Christian Fathers (and to Luther), wasan intense concern with human depravity, with pollution, with defilement-andwith cleansing, purity, and purgation-as well as an absoluteand violent animosity for all who disagreed with him?It is, of course, only coincidental, but during the summer of 1924,while Hitler was imprisoned outside Munich and was dictating to RudolfHess the contents of Mein Kampf, the author Joseph Conrad died of aheart attack near Canterbury, England. On the surface, there was almostnothing that the two men had in common. Among his numerous crimesagainst humanity, for instance, Hitler was to become the architect of Op-